I experimented with some levain bread variations this past weekend, inspired by Maurizio's beautiful blog (Food,Travel, Thought -- so well done). I made a double batch of Tartine-esque dough, adding walnuts and various dried berries to one half, and mixed olives and lemon zest to the other.
Glenn mentioned that the San Francisco country sourdough formula was a variation on a variation of Hamelman's Vermont sourdough. So of course I had to try it. Although, since I am in SF I guess this makes my VT Sourdough a SF sourdough. The husband and I both agreed with Hamleman's assessment that this is an excellent everyday bread.
I live in New York, and I have a pretty good selection of fine pizzerias from which I can get pizza. The same can pretty much be said for having a good selection of fine breads. In fact, every day, I walk through Grand Central Station and pass by a market that has some very good loaves at reasonable prices (unlike everything else in that market.)
I made this tasty bread again after baking my first flax seed soaker loaf. I had frozen half the dough from my first bake as it was too much for us, and I was really interested to see how this dough would respond to being frozen and defrosted. I am always fooled by the consistency of this dough (very stiff), and I was concerned because it didn't seem to rise enough. In the end, I got good oven spring and was pleased with the result .
Posted below is the recipe I use for my Portuguese sweet bread. I am interested in suggestions from the collective audience that may result in improvements in taste, texture, oven spring, etc.
In my last bake I used about 50g of leftover levain ... not sure it made any difference and it might be interesting to experiment with adding even more to assess its affects on the final product.
Regards-
Dave
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PORTUGUESE SWEET BREAD
Since we have about 15 minutes worth of levain work to do on Wednesdays, this leaves Lucy and I with lots of spare time to spend on our favorite Wednesday pastime – Dominoes! But it’s not any old Dominoes game either. If you know of some of Lucy’s wild bread recipes you can imagine what her version of dominoes is like…or maybe not since it so weird.
My wife and I have been taking Italian language lessons in a small group for about 2 years. Our teacher was born in Palermo and trained to be a teacher from 16 years old through University. She has lived in the US for about 15 years, and she misses Sicily a lot, including the bread.
I have made the Pane Valle Maggia (or "Pane Maggiore") 3 previous times. I have decided I actually liked the first version the best, so I made it again today. The procedure was substantially the same. See Pane Valle del Maggia.
I was in the mood to bake on Saturday, all I had in the house was a bag of store brand Whole Wheat flour so looked around the fresh loaf for something to bake that will require the least about of ingredients but still give me a nice sandwich loaf for the next few days. I’ve always been a fan of txfarmers super fluffy breads so after checking her blog index I found this 100% whole wheat bread
The below was inspired by her blog post but is actually a very different bread
Had my 2nd engineering staff meeting and thought it would be nice to offer a sweet bread instead of sourdough. Plus I haven't made this bread in a while and it's always a hit. Let me know if anyone wants the recipe. It's basically flour, potato water, mashed potatoes, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, lemon rind, and mace. I bought some AP flour for use in Irish Soda Bread but used a bunch of it for this bread ... will be interesting to see what happens when I use bread flour.
